Our Partnership With Families

School is an engaging and demanding environment that supports the needs of a vital and vibrant child. The brain uses more energy than any other organ in the body. In order for the brain to function well, it needs a constant supply of available energy. The best way to assure this steady supply of brain nourishment is to eat a well-balanced diet. We recommend a diet high in protein, rich in organically grown, whole fruits and vegetables, containing mostly whole-grain bread, cereals, and crackers, including less highly processed food, and only rare in sweets, other than the natural sugar contained in the whole fruit. Click here for helpful information regarding preparing lunches for school.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends the following hours of sleep for children:

• Infants 4 months to 12 months should sleep 12 to 16 hours per 24 hours (including naps) on a regular basis to promote optimal health.
• Children 1 to 2 years of age should sleep 11 to 14 hours per 24 hours (including naps) on a regular basis to promote optimal health.
• Children 3 to 5 years of age should sleep 10 to 13 hours per 24 hours (including naps) on a regular basis to promote optimal health.
• Children 6 to 12 years of age should sleep 9 to 12 hours per 24 hours on a regular basis to promote optimal health.
• Teenagers 13 to 18 years of age should sleep 8 to 10 hours per 24 hours on a regular basis to promote optimal health.

We support our parents as they work to improve their children's vitality by providing them with ample hours of serenity in nature, greater blocks of time for vigorous outdoor activities, longer periods of calm, uninterrupted play, and plenty of affectionate in-arms and lap time. A slow-paced lifestyle allows children time to assimilate and integrate their experiences, to daydream without interruption, to be bored enough to think creatively.

Extended, overly-packed, or erratic schedules so common to the American lifestyle today can serve as obstacles to healthy development. Children need open-ended time at home with puzzles, books, maps, music, art materials, constructive toys, athletic equipment, musical instruments, puppets, dress up clothes, science materials, gardening supplies, and carpentry tools.

Current research shows that digital media can have unwanted effects on developing children, particularly in early childhood. Our efforts to foster children’s healthy development and meaningful relationships with their environment and other people can be undermined by encounters with media that separate children from authentic experience and can promote a distorted, developmentally inappropriate, and consumerist view of the world.

Additionally, time spent enthralled by digital media is time not spent on activities that have positive effects on development. Please click here for more Austin Montessori School’s Screen Media Policy and Guidelines.

Humans have the longest childhood of any creature on Earth. This is because we have so much to learn after we are born! In order for this learning to take place, children need to fully experience the world in the stage of development dictated by their age. Modern society often pushes children to skip ahead and experience the world as though they are more developed than they are. When children engage in an elementary level style of socializing at the age of three, an upper elementary level style of socializing at the age of six, and an adolescent level style of socializing at age nine, they can become stressed during childhood and enter adolescence three to six years ahead of their age. When this happens, the children can skip over important phases of childhood, leaving gaps in their development and stress they are not yet equipped to handle.

We collaborate with parents to provide their children’s need for independence and belonging that invests them in their family culture and values. As such, we recommend accommodating the physical home to the needs of the child through child-sized and child-friendly family furnishings, equipment, and materials. Additionally, it means consciously involving children in daily tasks needed to run a home, such as laundry, menu planning, making shopping lists, cooking, and cleaning. We recognize the child’s need for an organized and orderly home with rich opportunities for active participation in family life for children.

We aim to empower parents to guide their children with affection and clarity. We support the parenting skills of our staff and families by practicing and sharing effective alternatives to rewards and punishments, better methods than labeling children and casting them in roles, more beneficial ways of setting limits, and better strategies for giving children age-appropriate power and control within safe boundaries. Through this cooperative effort, children are empowered to become self-disciplined and responsible, to express their feelings freely but respectfully, to make their own choices within options, to figure out solutions, to work out relationships, and mediate problems.